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Scaled Agile - Waterfall, Iterative, Hybrid. Why not go full agile?

More and more businesses are attempting to adopt agile across their whole IT portfolio. From maintenance to small projects to large enterprise programs, these organizations want to take advantages of the speed and quality improvements seen by many agile teams. However as an Agile Coach, I often hear questions such as:

We need to increase our time to market to stay competitive. However, our organization and culture is heavily based on a waterfall SDLC so how do we make sure our agile teams are successful in the interim?”

How can we manage agile and waterfall projects as part of a cohesive project portfolio?

We’re an agile team in a waterfall organization – how do we speed up development when we are dependent on these waterfall projects?

Can agile and waterfall methodologies coexist and still make the company successful?

While waterfall and agile have a lot of differences, some organizations have IT projects (or programs) that don’t lend themselves to moving to an agile for one reach or another.

In these cases, we have been asked to help these large complex programs, adopt a “hybrid” approach that blends the best practices from each. While not always easy, given the differences, see summary of the key differences, see link, many organizations many not be able to immediately have all their projects adopt “full agile”.

For example, there may be organizational change (e.g., changing how projects are funded, resources allocated) and cultural issues my block some organization from quickly moving to agile. In other cases, there may be governance, technical or project limitations may prevent the entire program from adopting agile practices (such as the requirement that specific requirements or other documents be created before project funding is released or the need to have the architecture “approved” by regulatory agency before coding can begin)

Disciplined Agile is Required!

Through adequate communication and effective cooperation between team members and diverse teams, however, the hybrid approach can often be a very effective approach to executing complex projects with shifting requirements. In most cases, rather than starting with Scrum, its often better to start with a scaled agile approach based supports a hybrid model. While there are several, two such practices that I have used successfully are Scaled Agile Framework and Disciplined Agile Delivery (or DAD).

The DAD framework also doesn’t’ prescribe a single lifecycle and have been included as part of an expanded lifecycle covering the pre-project and maintenance phases of a product lifecycle. In this example there are pre-project aspects to portfolio managementwhere potential projects are identified, prioritized, and funding is approved to start the Inception phase effort. After DAD Transition phase, the solution is operated and maintained in production.